


ŇIGĦŦΜΔŘ€

by Gem_Alawas



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Branding, Character Death In Dream, Dream-style weird, Fear of Heights, Gen, Graphic descriptions of a corpse, Implied Self-Harm, Implied Threat of Suicide, Mentioned Cannibalism, Mourning, Nausea, Nightmares, Self-Loathing, Something that may or may not be a soul mate AU reference, Suicide, Weirdness, attempted physical assault, cursing, even I don't know I'm just writing down a nasty nightmare I had
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 07:43:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19080559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gem_Alawas/pseuds/Gem_Alawas
Summary: **Please pay attention to the tags! This work contains highly sensitive content and is not suitable for all readers!**Almost a year ago, I had a nightmare. I still think of it almost every day, and it still remains as clear to me as the day I woke up from it. So, at last, I chose to write it down and share it with the world. This is a retelling of that nightmare - one in which I was forced to contend with the horrific suicide of Jake English. Be warned: as well as containing sensitive subjects, this work is a...rather raw look at my own emotions. It may appear somewhat unpolished, and that's because it is. A second chapter may be added at some point, but for now this stands alone.





	ŇIGĦŦΜΔŘ€

It started rather abruptly, as dreams tended to, though I didn’t realize that I was dreaming then. I had the strange sense that I knew what was going on, that I knew why I was here, that I was indeed in a world that supported itself and made perfect sense. It was a feeling common to my dreams, but particularly strong in this one. The surroundings were familiar – not more than a couple weeks earlier, I’d walked and ran through this very area, a lovely trail and monument in Hawai’i. I stood in a small hut of sorts with no walls and a thatched roof supported by wooden pillars – a feature of the area that was decidedly not unique. My dad was present along with me, silent but unwavering. Around me were pedestals that reached about to my chest in height, each topped with a metal water bottle and a piece of paper. The bottles were familiar, the same kind that my mom liked. They seemed a little out of place, even then, but I knew what they were for. It made sense enough – a real person of the world my twisted subconscious had built would indeed know what I did. They held an important function in a strange little ritual. A ritual that I was about to undertake. I was hesitant as I approached one of the little pedestals.

 

I “knew” and at the same time had no idea what would happen when I did what I knew that I had to do. I was caught, between fear of what I half-knew would happen and fear of the unknown. However, both were quickly quashed by another feeling – a sense of duty. For some reason, I had to go through with it. The little pieces of paper, or two of them in any case, held a message that I had to hear – but what? I delicately picked up a letter in one hand, and the bottle it leaned against in the other. I didn’t look away, didn’t look for confirmation, though in waking I normally would. This meant something important to me. I took a deep sip from the bottle, and then turned my eyes to the letter – and a voice came crashing through my ears, through my mind, for only me to hear. The sound of a young man sobbing, struggling even to communicate what exactly had done this. Just the sound of the voice itself was enough to strike sorrow through me. He sounded…the voice was truly the sound of heartbreak, the sound of loss, the sound of pain if I’d ever known it.

 

The majority of the words were soon lost to me, but they didn’t matter, what mattered was the message – and the piece I wished didn’t stay with me, the sound of his voice, the faint scraps of the words. As he spoke, a deep sort of horror settled over me. The horror of the death of someone I knew of. Someone who, despite never having met him, I cared about. It hurt, an almost-physical pain in my chest, like being struck in the heart. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for me to start crying. I forced myself to keep it quiet, keep from sobbing – I needed to hear this more than I needed to let out my emotions, agonizing as they were. Slowly, through pain I could scarcely imagine, the somehow-familiar voice of Dirk Strider told me of a death, a life lost far too early. The death of Jake English, the man he loved. He-he had taken his own life. I didn’t know why – maybe Dirk didn’t know, maybe he didn’t want to say. Somehow, I didn’t want to believe that Jake would truly despair that much. Maybe something, someone else was at fault.

 

Someone, perhaps, who’d manipulated him, or controlled him, or even faked his suicide. I knew there was no reason to believe it but believing that someone had that kind of power and evil in them was better than believing that Jake English, a boy who I really shouldn’t have cared so much about but did, had killed himself. However, there was another part to it. In my opinion, a much more important part. I could fix this. Somehow. I could bring Jake back, and Dirk begged me to with the agony of a person who’d lost everything, a man who hinged his hope on one final chance. I got the horrifying feeling that if I failed, he would join Jake rather than go on alone. The second letter was much the same as the first with one crucial difference – this time, it was the voice of John, desperate and afraid, pleading with me to save his family. One letter had been more than enough to convince me, and the second only made the feeling of being struck by a knife even worse. At the very least, a life rested in my hands. At the most, many did – but it didn’t matter where the truth lay. I was going to do everything I could to change this, a decision I had made the second Dirk had told me I was capable of it – no matter how strange it seemed.

 

I knew where I had to go, and I wasn’t about to delay – at least, not more than I had to. I was halted by tears, by sobs, by shaking, by the struggle that came of even speaking or listening to my dad. I knew my destination well enough, even had a rough idea of how I could get there if worst came to worst and I had to find my way there on my own. Whatever it took, I’d do it. I couldn’t even think about any other course of action. My goal was a school I had once joked about attending – the University of Hawai’i. The school soon loomed large before me, and almost without pause I was racing, half-stumbling in my haste through empty halls, followed by my dad. I knew almost precisely where I was going – he didn’t. It only took me a moment to reach a truly vast central room, not so much gym or cafeteria-like as reminiscent of a cathedral in sheer magnitude. The roof must have been hundreds of feet high, and what seemed like hundreds of people filled the floor, still managing to leave a large empty space in the center.

 

I blasted through the crowd like they weren’t there. I couldn’t be held up. As far as I knew, I had no time limit, but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t let this horror stand for a minute longer than I absolutely had to, not when it hurt people I knew of and cared too damn much about this much, not even when it hurt me this much – as little as I generally cared about my own pain. Their faces blurred together, they meant nothing to me, but as I sprinted into the gap and paused for breath, I couldn’t help but see that almost every eye was fixed on me, or on my dad, or on what I hadn’t looked at yet. Something up above the ground where we all were – something I wasn’t quite prepared to look at, maybe never would be, the moments that I knew careened towards me half-thankfully and half-upsettingly delayed because there was someone walking to intercept me. The man who walked up was tall, dark, and familiar, a face from my own middle school. I knew him as Dr. Jones, an assistant principal. He wore a mask of an expression, all grim and solemn and I knew precisely why. A person had died on his grounds. He spoke to me in a soft tone, asking what I was doing – and reacting with no small doubts when I told him. I couldn’t blame him for his misgivings.

 

I had the intent of reviving a person who had died, and I held no powers of my own. There was no reason to believe that I had any chance-save one. One that I promptly showed both the official and my dad, who agreed – he knew I held nothing to surmount the laws of nature, or at least he thought he did. I raised my left hand, using my right to shift aside the ludicrous number of bracelets that I wore. Tattooed there was a name. Jake English, written in the same green of his text. I met the man’s near-black eyes with my own dark brown ones and spoke.  
_“It’ll work. I know it will. It has to.”_  
I didn’t know, but I had to believe that it would. It hurt far too much to think otherwise. Somehow, I knew that in this world, these sorts of tattoos indicated a connection of some sort. I didn’t care to think much on it, but I knew one thing about them for sure...or well, I believed it. I had to.

 

These little tattoos – or, in any case, the connections they represented – would allow one to bring back the person whose name they held. Revive them from death, if only once. I could save Jake. I could undo what had been done, return the life wrongly lost. That was all that mattered, not the surprise in the man’s eyes as both he and my dad backed off, getting far out of my way. For a brief moment, as I strode towards the center of the room, finally acknowledging the secured steel ladder I knew I’d have to climb, it seemed as though I was nearly there – then I was struck. I was thrown harshly to the floor, twisting on instinct both to fall more favorably and see what had done this, and I was greeted with a horrifying sight.

 

The man lunging at me was bald, wrinkled like an old piece of paper, and so grossly sunburned that his skin was peeling from his head, the eyes sunk into his face pitch-black and soulless. I squirmed to free myself, caring now for almost nothing but my goal, even my own safety practically forgotten, but he grabbed my leg with both hands and yanked me back, leaning down towards my exposed skin. Somehow, I knew his intent as I struggled, forcing him somewhat away. He was going to hurt me – going to bite into and eat any piece of me he could, try to kill me with his teeth like a fucking jungle animal. None of the crowd, not even my ex-military, normally-awesomely-protective dad or the six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound assistant principal; so much as moved to my aid.

 

As a hand clamped around my shin again when I tried to get away, as hot breath burned on my skin when he got much too close for comfort, as I desperately but almost uselessly tried to shove his head away with my hands; a primal sort of panic managed to supersede my anguish, and my bent on reaching Jake. I turned on my attacker, fighting animalism with animalism, striking with fists and feet until I was able to back away and he, too, backed off, apparently having decided that I was too much trouble but not leaving the room either. I took another step back, and a shadow fell over me. Fuck, but I didn’t want to think about what cast that – and then I felt something. A wet, cold stickiness on my shoulder. I turned my head and gagged, launching myself backwards and nearly into the metal ladder. What had dripped on me was blood, cold and sticky when I desperately tried to wipe it away, already driven right back to panic for all my efforts to stay calm.

 

Shaking as I finally managed to stop my blood-related hysteria, I turned to the ladder. I hated ladders, feared ladders, especially ones like these, thin and metal, with only small round rungs rather than steps and no handlebar or side railing of any sort, only the bare minimum of what was required for it to be a ladder at all. I gulped, and then grabbed the ladder – pausing only briefly when I saw the red smeared on my hand. I tried to focus as I ascended, but my damned brain wouldn’t quit reminding me. Reminding me of the way Dirk and John had sounded. Reminding me of the attack I had just fought off. Reminding me of how much I feared ladders as I climbed away from the students – whose watchful, silently expectant gazes didn’t help anything. Reminding me of what I was going to find at the top, how terrible it was going to be.

 

But most of all, it reminded me of how fucking afraid I was that this wouldn’t work. How little faith I had, in truth – and how desperate I was to stake what felt like everything on a myth. How strong my feelings were, for these people I’d never even met, except in another dream or two, ones I scarcely even remembered. How I couldn’t even imagine it not working – how even thinking of the idea made me feel as though I was going to break like glass, just shatter into pieces if Jake didn’t wake up. I had to stop every moment or two and blink away burning tears enough that I could see to climb, too afraid to let go with even one hand and wipe them away. It seemed to take forever, but at last, I reached the top, and-and-fuck. I thought the voices of Dirk and John had been hard to bear? I thought the pitch-black, empty eyes of the cannibal had been frightening? I’d known nothing.

 

I’d thought I’d been prepared for dead bodies before, having seen and even carried those of cats and dogs without bother. I’d found Jake, bloodied and dead as he presumably had been for some time now, hanging from a noose – and the dead body of a person was far more of a horror than I could ever have foreseen. His skin was pale, bloodlessly so, making the stains of blood on his arms and legs stand out as if against snow, his lips parted slightly as though for breath and blue-white. His hair was matted to his head, his head itself listed to the side, his whole body hanging so limply – so still – as to be almost violently unnatural. But his eyes, even with the distortion of his glasses, they were without doubt the worst thing. They were open, and not quite the wonderful green I held on my arm, but glassy, glazed and lifeless like marbles sunk into his death-slack face, staring off endlessly into space. Truly, nothing of life remained in him, and that alone was enough to break the tenuous self-control that had gotten me up the ladder. I clung to the top rung in fear as my entire form was wracked with sobs, violently enough that I feared I’d be shaken off to fall the far-too-great distance to the ground.

 

After a brief moment, not even bothering to try and regain any kind of composure or even proper sight at this point, knowing that the cause was utterly lost, I decided on my next action. As I understood it, to bring Jake back, I needed to place my left hand – the one with the wrist that held the tattoo – against his cheek. A strange method, but among even my limited knowledge there lay stranger. With less hesitation than I thought I’d have to fight, my anguish at seeing Jake dead reaching dominance over my fear, I released the top rung, balancing on my feet and the way I leaned against the somewhat-inclined metal, and reached for the hanging corpse of Jake English. I wrapped my arms around him with the intent of pulling him up onto the ladder with me, as I figured awakening while hanging from a noose would be far more unpleasant than the same while on a ladder, even uncomfortably close to a stranger.

 

As soon as I made contact, though, the cold of his skin registered and I nearly pulled away – it just seemed so unnatural to touch a human and feel them cold, so painfully still without a heartbeat or breath, so…dead. I pulled him up, and his head lolled back at an angle no human neck should ever reach for any reason, his whole body drooping dead weight – I hadn’t realized that he’d probably broken his neck and died that way, given how far the rafters still were even with how far I’d climbed. I retched, shuddering, sobbing, and released him, grabbing onto the ladder again and curling in on myself as much as I could under the circumstances, which wasn’t much. It took a long moment and a few deep breaths before I was certain that I wouldn’t vomit, and then a second attempt. This time, I used one hand to support his head, dealing with the cold stickiness of what I didn’t doubt was blood in his hair.

 

It took a few minutes to drag his lifeless body over the ladder, even with it not-quite vertical, between his dead weight and my own various handicaps. There were several close calls to falling between the tears that I couldn’t stop from clouding my vision and the sheer difficulty of getting him over the ladder, especially considering that I needed to lean back somewhat for him to fit and step down so his whole form would be braced against the metal. Despite that, eventually, I managed to get him settled on the relatively thin ladder, using both my own body and my right arm to keep him from falling, while I half-desperately tugged at the noose with my left hand. I didn’t want him to wake up with a fucking noose around his neck – and as I did, close as I was, I noticed more little things that frightened and upset me all over again – for instance, just under his eyes were heavy bruise-like spots of clotted blood, as were around where the noose itself was.

As close as my precarious position on the ladder forced me to press against him, I should have been able to feel his breaths, his heartbeat, his every move given the mere couple of inches that separated my face from his – but there was absolutely none of that. Just cold, stillness, and a silence broken only by my own ragged sobs, which at that point had nearly become loud enough to be screams – and yet I had no control over them, no will left with which to try and calm myself. Finally, finally, I managed to get the rope over his head without knocking his glasses off, or himself or me off the ladder. Finally, I could bring him back. But I hesitated. Of course, the ever-indecisive, ever-afraid me hesitated. It seemed like I always did, no matter what. What if it didn’t work? What if he didn’t come back? No, no, I couldn’t – I couldn’t think that, I couldn’t think about that. It had to work. I had to do this. Or at least – I had to try. Barely able to see for tears, I shifted so I could reach out, lay my hand on his cheek, bring him back. I reached for him, my heart beating a wild frenzy, breaths catching in my throat, tears tracing lines on my face, at last –

…

Slowly, my eyes opened, taking in the ceiling that they stared up at. Blink. White popcorn ceiling. Blink again. Remember. That was – that had been a dream. And I’d woken, woken before I could –  
I began to laugh, slow and quiet and fundamentally wrong, the laugh of someone walking from a killer knowing they survived, the laugh of both relief and that which would worry many people, were anyone there to hear it. The only other in the house was my mom, who was several dozen feet away and sleeping soundly – I was free to have my quiet fit of wheezing laughter at the blankness of the ceiling in peace, and then cry and sob at the memory, to re-live it again and again until the pain had dulled to an ache, that pain for people who had never existed and never would.

##### I had failed.  
But it wasn’t real, I couldn’t have.  
I had woken too early.  
But he wasn’t real, he wasn’t dead, there was no Jake English for me to save.  
Why…why did that thought hurt so much?


End file.
